Johan Sanneblad

If you are using a HTC Touch Diamond, you might be interested in what technologies HTC used to create their start page application TouchFlo 3D.

If you go to “Settings” and scroll down to “About” you will see a list of copyright notices from the various technologies used. This list however does not explain what the product does, and in some cases it does not even describe the full product name (e.g. the Vincent OpenGL ES renderer is listed as “OpenGL by Hans-Martin Will”.

Below I have “translated” the copyright notices on the HTC Touch Flo 3D About page into product names, and also added brief descriptions to the products taken from their home pages.

• Boost. “Free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries.”
  *Open source*
• FreeImage. “An Open Source library project for developers who would like to support popular graphics image formats like PNG, BMP, JPEG, TIFF and others as needed by today’s multimedia applications.”
  *Open source*
• Lua. “Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language.”
  *Open source*
• Luabind. “Luabind is a library that helps you create bindings between C++ and Lua. It has the ability to expose functions and classes, written in C++, to Lua.”
  *Open source*
• Vincent 3D Rendering Library. “This project maintains a compliant implementation of the OpenGL ES 1.1 API specification for mobile devices.”
  *Open source*
• STLport. “STLport is implementation of C++ Standard Library”
  *Open source*
• RapidXml. “RapidXml is an attempt to create the fastest XML parser possible, while retaining useability, portability and reasonable W3C compatibility.”
  *Open source*
• SWIG. “SWIG is a software development tool that connects programs written in C and C++ with a variety of high-level programming languages (such as Lua).”
  *Open source*
• BString. “The Better String Library is an abstraction of a string data type which is superior to the C library char buffer string type, or C++’s std::string.”
  *Open source*

What I found most interesting in the above list is that HTC used the now discontinued Vincent renderer for 3D graphics instead of trying to get Direct 3D Mobile to work. I can only assume that this is to help HTC move their code base to other platforms such as Android in the near future ( which supports Open GL ES 1.0).